Introduction to Conference on Christian Legal Thought

At the suggestion of several fellow MOJers, I offer below my opening remarks at the 2012 Conference on Christian Legal Thought co-sponsored by the Law Professors’ Christian Fellowship and the Lumen Christi Institute that took place this past Saturday, January 7^th, at the University Club in Washington, D.C.

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Thank you and good morning.  As many of you know, the Lumen Christi Institute is an academic institution founded in 1997, based at the University of Chicago, and dedicated to the revitalization of Catholic intellectual life on the nation’s campuses.  This is the eighth year that the Lumen Christi Institute has co-hosted this one-day academic conference with the Law Professors’ Christian Fellowship and it has proven to be a very fruitful collaboration for both the Institute and the Fellowship, for Catholic and Evangelical law professors and indeed Christian legal academics from every denomination.

This summer, my wife and children and I visited my late Irish father’s family in England.  We had a wonderful time visiting with our relations in north London, down in Surrey, up in Yorkshire, over in Birmingham and the Midlands and back in London.  In traveling the English countryside I took the occasion to read a book I am embarrassed to say I had never read before, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.  The novel shares with us the recollections of Charles Ryder in his encounter with members of the aristocratic and Catholic Flyte family headed by Lord Alexander Flyte, the Marquess of Marchmain.  Ryder forms a special friendship with Sebastian, the younger Flyte son, while the two are students at Oxford.  Later in life, he becomes for a time the lover of Sebastian’s sister, Julia.

The Marchmains are a highly peculiar and deeply flawed family – flaws that stand in sharp relief to the family’s outward devotion to the Catholic faith:  Lord Marchmain lives apart from the family with his mistress in Venice; Sebastian is a drunkard and perhaps a homosexual; Julia marries a politically ambitious non-Catholic divorcee.  Although it is true that numerous human failings play a vital role in the make up of the narrative, the novel is not a critique of religion through an exposition of the hypocrisy of those who profess belief in the Christian faith.  Nor is it a story in which the characters engage in lengthy theological disputations concerning the existence of God, the problem of evil, or the possibility of free will.  Instead, Waugh described the book as a novel that “deals with what is theologically termed ‘the operation of Grace,’ that is to say the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.”  Indeed, it may fairly be said that the principle actor in the drama that unfolds in the novel is not Charles Ryder or any member of the Marchmain family but the Holy Spirit.

The first passage in which religion is mentioned takes place during Charles’ first extended stay at the Flyte family residence, Brideshead Castle.  Sebastian has attended Mass in the chapel on the grounds of the estate and Ryder offers the following remarks:

 “Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one that I felt particularly concerned to solve.  I had no religion.  I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays.  The view implicit in my  education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed  as a myth, and that  opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division of which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not; at best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of ‘complexes’ and ‘inhibitions’ – catchwords of the decade – and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries.  No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophic system and intransigent historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested.”  Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited 85-86 (1944)

I want to suggest that Charles Ryder’s description of his friend Sebastian’s religion is an accurate portrayal of how the vast majority of our secular colleagues in the legal academy view the Christian faith, and, by extension, the project of Christian legal thought.  To the extent they think on it at all, most of our colleagues believe that Christianity is a “slightly ornamental hobby” that has “long been exposed as a myth.”  They are convinced that the value of its ethical teaching – especially on the neuralgic issues of the day, issues that potentially intersect with law – is decidedly negative, indeed, dangerous to the point of being obscene and inhuman.  Here Christianity exhibits intolerance (in, for example, its opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion) hypocrisy (in what its clergy preaches from the pulpit and how they actually behave) and sheer stupidity (in its opposition to the use of condoms in countries where AIDS is rampant).  Where it doesn’t inspire hatred or repugnance it generates only indifference – its persistent appeal is an “enigma” that no one “feels particularly concerned to solve.” 

Yet, unlike Ryder we know that Christianity does indeed express a coherent philosophic perspective and that it makes intransigent historical claims.  Indeed, as those who have received the Gospel – the Good News for all humanity – we know that the claims of Christianity are not merely defensible but compelling.  Moreover, as students of and participants in the Church’s intellectual tradition, we know that Christianity has something profoundly meaningful to say about law, and justice, and institutions, and authentic human flourishing.

The lack of genuine dialogue with our secular colleagues – those at the AALS who are sometimes referred to at this conference as being on “the other side of the street” – can be a source of frustration and disappointment.  No one wants to be dismissed out of hand, to not be taken seriously – especially those who earnestly seek to engage in the kind of honest, searching conversation that is the bedrock of the academic enterprise.

Still, we can be confident that our efforts are not in vain.  Our meetings together – Catholic and Protestant – bear witness to the Lord’s prayer “ut unum sint” – “That they be one” (John 17:21).  The exchange of ideas, the critical thinking we perform together will, perhaps in ways we cannot now appreciate, contribute to the reclamation of law and the reform of legal education.  The fellowship we share and the prayer we make is no “quaint observance” but a foretaste and anticipation of the fulfillment of human nature transfigured in the life of the Divine.

As we begin our day together we should bear in mind the theme of Waugh’s novel, the lesson that the once agnostic Charles Ryder learns in a way that no lecture at Oxford could possibly demonstrate – that grace abides, that we are not merely workers – laborers who toil in the legal vineyards of the Lord – we are being worked upon, silently, lovingly, mysteriously by unseen hands.  We see ourselves as potters at work at the wheel, and so we are in a small way – but we are also clay in the hands (cf. Jeremiah 18:6; Romans 9:21) of Him who fashioned the sun and other stars and by His love moves them in the wheel of the firmament (cf. Dante, Paradiso, canto 33).